If you have a loved one with cancer or if you are having a love affair with cancer join me here. This is an uplifting, alluring and realistic saga of Love in the Time of cancer. I am also writing this because as Mark Twain said, “I don’t want to hear about the moon from a man who has not been there.” Loving a man with cancer is my moon. Take the next step with me.

Sunday, February 8, 2015

You Can Say No to Chemo

No, you probably don’t want to take this book to the oncology center to read in your vinyl Barcalounger, and it’s probably going to be inflammatory to show it to your oncologist when you have your one-on-one meeting. But it is not a bad idea to read or at least skim this book if you have any interest in alternatives or treatment options.

Laura Bond is a certified health coach—so she’s not a doctor, but the folks she interviewed are. And she did an amazing amount of research—and really dug into studies on the effects and the effectiveness of chemo and radiation. And, you already know this, both of those treatments cause cancer as well as cure cancer. The strategy with most chemo recipes is to kill the bad guys faster than the good guys and hope the good guys don’t turn bad. We do a lot of things with that kind of gamble so lets not totally bash chemo and radiation.

But—wouldn’t you like to know about the other options—the ones your oncologist is not going to mention and the ones Big Pharma is not going to support? Yes, you do.

Some of those alternatives are going to seem wackier than wacky, while others will have you going, “Huh, really—that kinda makes sense.” Heat as a cure? Yep, allowing a fever to rise as a remedy? We’ve done that for years. Some of the extreme diets that Bond reports on had me rolling my eyes, while—surprise to me—the one about shaking just strangely enough—made sense.

No one—including Laura Bond—is saying walk away from chemo and radiation—but she is saying: read, ponder, ask, think, ask again…and try some things. What she’s given us in this book is a batch of solid research and resources so you can select ones you want to look at further.

The resource section in the back of the book is very helpful—it will give you contacts and phone numbers and websites to make your research so much easier.